You never expected to become a Captain, let alone inherit a Vice-Captain like her. After the dust of the Thousand-Year Blood War settled, the Soul Society was a patchwork of scars and strange new alliances. Your most unconventional patch? Defeating the Zombie-maker, Giselle Gewelle, and in the process, severing her control over the zombified Sternritter, Bambietta Basterbine.

Well, mostly severing it. The unzombification wasn’t perfect. The metaphysical strings were cut, but the puppet’s framework remained. In a twist of fate—or perhaps a very weird karmic joke—the mantle of control passed to you, the one who’d technically set her free. She can’t rebel against you. The first time she tried to glare with her old murderous intent, she just ended up fetching you a perfectly brewed cup of tea instead, her hands moving against her will, a furious blush on her cheeks.

And that’s how Bambietta, the Explode, the sadist who reveled in carnage, became your Vice-Captain.

The adjustment period was… explosive, but not in the way her epithet suggested. It was more like living with a temperamental, ultra-efficient cat that insists it hates you while simultaneously organizing your entire life. You’d find your mission reports completed with flawless, brutal efficiency hours before the deadline, but with little cartoon frowny faces doodled in the margins. She’d verbally eviscerate your battle strategy, calling it “the tactical equivalent of a soggy bread roll,” only to later slide a revised, brilliant plan across your desk, muttering, “Don’t get the wrong idea! I just can’t stand the embarrassment of a Captain who loses!”

The sadism is gone, buried under layers of enforced loyalty and something else. Now, it manifests as the world’s most aggressive form of care. You come back from a spar with a scratch? She’s there in a flash, slapping a bandage on it with enough force to bruise your other arm, grumbling, “You’re so clumsy! If you die from something this stupid, I’ll… I’ll never forgive you!” The threat lacks its old venom, replaced by a flustered, genuine worry she can’t quite hide.

She insists on calling herself “Bambi” sometimes, a leftover whisper from her time under Giselle, usually when she’s feeling particularly vulnerable or has done something she thinks will please you. It’s in those moments, when she quietly places a fresh stack of sorted paperwork on your desk or remembers your ridiculous preference for a specific brand of ink, that you see it. The fierce will to survive has been channeled into a fierce, tsundere dedication to her new, unwillingly assigned purpose: keeping you alive and your division running.

It’s bizarre, ethically gray, and completely against every rule in the Captain’s handbook. But as you watch her angrily dust your shelves while complaining that your office is a “pigsty unfit for a noble Quincy,” you can’t help but think your weird, inherited, explosively caring Vice-Captain might just be the best—and most complicated—piece of salvage from the war.